Porto

Port in the Storm: Cooking with Portugal’s Iconic Dessert Wine

This is a day to do nothing. After a week of working from home, I’m facing another weekend of lockdown. Our restaurants are closed, and so are the bars – nowhere to get a drink. It’s raining outside, and I realize that I have chosen the wrong book to read: “The Winter of Our Discontent” by John Steinbeck makes the pandemic numbers even more difficult to bear. I open my computer and scan the news. Stopping to read an article about the selection of the year’s best Port wine, I remember that, yes, January 27 was declared International Port Day – a day for the world to celebrate this fortified vinho – a decade or so ago by the Center for Wine Origins, an organization in Washington D.C. At this point in time, I’ll take any reason to celebrate.

Queens

Boishakhi: A Journey to Bangladesh, Via Ozone Park

Opening a restaurant during the pandemic was a “big risk,” Khaled Khan tells us. With his business partner and longtime friend, Tozammel Tanzil, we’re sitting in the back of Boishakhi, which they introduced last autumn in Ozone Park, a neighborhood in southern Queens not far from JFK Airport. “People don’t want to take chances on food they don’t know,” Tozammel adds. Boishakhi, a new sibling to an Astoria restaurant of the same name, serves the food of Bangladesh. Born in the 1947 partition of British India and previously known as East Pakistan, Bangladesh is a densely populated country on the Bay of Bengal that shares a small border with Myanmar. Its only other immediate neighbor is modern-day India, which envelopes Bangladesh to the east, north and west.

Athens

Recipe: Real-Deal Moussaka, a Misunderstood Greek Classic

When a tourist thinks of Greek cuisine, despite its vast richness, there are usually certain stereotypical dishes that come to mind: Greek salad, souvlaki, creamy tzatziki and, perhaps above all, moussaka, a hearty baked dish with layers of eggplant and meat sauce, all topped with a creamy, cheesy béchamel sauce. To be honest, I often feel ashamed of the moussaka that most tourist restaurants around Greece serve to visitors. It’s heavy, oily and usually nothing like the real deal. I hardly ever order moussaka at a restaurant unless I have total trust in the place. Like many other Greeks I know, moussaka is a dish I mostly enjoy cooking and eating at home.

Tbilisi

Mama Terra: Detox, With a Mexican Twist

Anthony Bourdain liked to say the body is a playground, a sentiment we couldn’t agree with more, especially when digging into the cholesterol-laden acharuli khachapuri or wiping a ketsi clean of its spicy pool of kupati – Georgian sausage – grease with a piece of bread. Shots of chacha and glasses of wine make us swing, bounce, teeter-totter and sometimes fall, and in the morning when the fog and pain clears, we may remember that the body is also a fragile temple requiring more ministration than a sacrificial bowl of tripe soup can provide. In Tbilisi’s Mtatsminda district there is a sanctuary providing both solace to devotees of healthy eating and penance to gluttonous sinners like us. No ordinary hummus bar, this affectionate “eating apartment” is called Mama Terra – Veggie Corner.

Athens

CB Book Club: Marianna Leivaditaki’s “Aegean”

We recently spoke to Marianna Leivaditaki about her cookbook, “Aegean: Recipes from the Mountains to the Sea” (Kyle Books, September 2020), which delves into the cuisine of Crete, the largest island in Greece and one of its most distinct. Marianna grew up on Crete, where her father was a fisherman and her mother ran the family’s restaurant, before later settling in the UK – she’s now the head chef at Morito Hackney Road in London. A skilled storyteller, she weaves an enveloping portrait of life on the island, which is simple but simultaneously rich, and presents its cuisine through a personal lens. The end result is a transporting love letter to Crete, an island with so much to give.

Athens

Recipe: Stifado, a Greek Stew for All Seasons

Greek stifado is a special dish: It requires time to prepare but the result is succulent, rewarding and stomach-warming, like stews ought to be. Tender, juicy chunks of meat are patiently cooked at low heat amid a sea of small pearl onions in a rich red wine sauce flavored with warming spices and herbs, like allspice, cinnamon, cloves, bay leaves and rosemary, that I tend to associate more with the winter season. By the end, the onions go glossy and caramelized in this delicious sauce and the pieces of meat are fork tender. The word stifado derives from the ancient Greek word tyfos (τύφος), which means steam. This is the root for the Latin word estufare, from which the Italian stufato (or Venetian stufado), the Italian word for stew, was born.

Marseille

La Sicile Authentique: An Italian Hideaway

Located at the eastern edge of Marseille, Saint-Julien is a far cry from the bustling city center. Here, congested boulevards stretch into narrow streets, and birdsong, not the honking of scooters, fills the air. The residential neighborhood has mostly standalone houses, from 17th-century bourgeois bastides (farmhouses) to 20th-century homes built by immigrant families searching for a small-town vibe. One of them feels like it’s set in an Italian village, thanks to an enterprising Sicilian. Liliane Casteldaccia runs Sicile Authentique, an épicerie, restaurant and small catering company, out of the ground floor of the house in which she grew up. At the foot of the driveway, the wood-paneled dining area is peppered with maps and Italian memorabilia.